Subject: RE: [lojban] Complements and adjuncts

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 20:15:07 +0100

Colin:
> The question is, does Lojban distinguish complements and adjuncts?
> 
> At first sight, the answer is yes: by design, the defined terbri of a selbri
> are complements (i.e. its meaning is incomplete without them), and any
> additional terbri attached by sumtcita must be adjuncts (optional extras
> specification, but not an essential part of the meaning).

Most adjuncts in English could be translated by a BAI sumti, but a proper
answer to your question needs to sort out what the nature of the complement/
adjunct distinction is. For English (I say, speaking as a perhaps lacklustre
but professional syntactician of English), the criterial property of adjuncts
seems to be that they are recursible: X --> X + adjunct. It pretty much
follows from this that semantically, the adjunct must express a predicate
of which X is an argument.

If you accept my definition of adjuncts, then BAI sumti are not adjuncts,
but relative phrases *are* adjuncts of sumti. (My reading of the thread
is that this is the conclusion you reached, but for different reasons.)
My knowledge of Lojban is too sketchy to say whether there are pukka 
adjuncts of selbri/bridi.

--And.